1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for responding to a timeout of a message in a parallel computer.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Current parallel computers are capable of processing in parallel a number of tasks of a job that just a few years ago would have seemed unimaginable. For example, current parallel computers may execute in parallel thousands of tasks as part of a job. Tasks executing on compute nodes in the parallel computer often send each other data, in the form of messages. When one tasks notices a message did not receive an acknowledgement from a remote task within a specified period of time, execution of the job may be terminated. With so many tasks of the job executing on different compute nodes, it may be difficult to respond to a timeout failure of one task.